Hong Kong pooey

Well, this has been one of the weirder and least pleasant weeks of my life so far.

As you know, we flew to Hong Kong on Monday from Beijing so that Peter could have his operation. My purpose was to be hospital visitor, helpmeet, and carrier of heavy items.

So what do I do instead?

I go and catch gastro-entiritis, probably from some dodgy salad on plane or in hotel, though I can't be sure. I was ok in the morning and up until Peter's surgery, which was at 1pm, but suffered progressive stomach pains after lunch while sitting by his bedside. By 5pm I was projectile vomiting and being taken downstairs to A&E in a wheelchair, and by 9pm I'd been admitted.

So at the time when I was supposed to be tending to the patient's every need, bringing him grapes and so forth, I was in fact lying on a bed two floors below him IN THE SAME HOSPITAL, attached to an IV drip and generally puking my guts up! He'd had his op and was fine, if a bit tender in the nether regions, while my nether regions were making a bid for freedom. So he mostly ended up visiting me.

Fucking fantastic. You couldn't make it up.

So we both spent Monday and Tuesday nights there, which at least saved on taxi fares. They were nice, and everything, but even so. Nuns visited us (it was a Catholic hospital - a fact we didn't discover until we got there). Nurses took our temperature and blood pressure about every hour. Peter was in a semi-private room with a guy who hawked and snorked every few seconds and snored like a rhinoceros. I was in a general ward next to the Amazing Human Sheep, who bleated loudly all night. Peter has a sore bottom. Actually, so do I. And a sore stomach. And two sore hands. I was, I repeat, on a drip. An actual drip. I've never even been in hospital before. It was horrendous.

We were both discharged today and keep telling each other that 'one day we'll look back and laugh' about 'that time we both ended up in hospital in Hong Kong'. We came to China because we wanted an adventure, but there are limits!

Anyway, hopefully we'll be heading back to Harbin on Friday, as THE GOOD NEWS is that our 19 boxes of stuff, which we last saw when it was driven off from Edinburgh on a rainy night in August, has finally arrived in China and cleared customs, and is ready to be delivered to us on Saturday if we're there to receive it. Hooray! I must say there were times when I gave it up for lost.

But I'm afraid I can't tell you much about Hong Kong, having seen very little of it. They drive on the left, and have British plugs. It's hilly. It's hot.

And, er, don't eat the salad.

The robe robbers

Bit of a drama this week. Just when you thought everything was finally starting to settle down for us following the visa debacle, Peter had to go to hospital for an emergency procedure under local anaesthetic to treat an abscess in his colon. I’ll spare you the details, but it wasn’t pleasant. What might be described as a major pain in the arse.

He happened to be in Beijing for the first of three launches which he’d organised for his company. After arriving in considerable agony, he made some fruitless entreaties to BUPA International, who seemed to find the task of locating an English-speaking doctor in China’s capital a little too challenging. Hmmm. Had he consulted the local guidebook in the room, he would have found there are many hospitals to choose from, such as the Shunyi Hospital, the 2nd Shunyi Hospital, the 3rd Shunyi Hospital, or the Longwinded Town Hygienic Service Centre. In the end though he managed to track down a fantastic western hospital who sorted him out. He’s ok now but needs to have a further operation on Monday under general anaesthetic to remove the remainder of the nastiness which they couldn’t reach. However, on the recommendation of the doctor we are flying to Hong Kong for this.

It’s not the ideal way to see the world. Poor Peter has spent the last five days trapped in a Beijing airport hotel, which is a pretty grim fate. No trips to the Forbidden City or the Great Wall for him, on this occasion anyway. I joined him yesterday, laden with summer clothes for our non-sightseeing trip to Hong Kong, where it’ll be in the region of 28-30°C. (It was actually snowing in Harbin when I left yesterday morning). It’s quite warm and sunny here (although the locals all think it’s cold and keep telling us to put our coats on), but we’re limited in our attire as the hotel has a dress code which demands that you don’t wear a ‘singlet’ in public. This immediately made my hackles rise. Peter wondered if he could wear a doublet, but I said that would be twice as bad.

The hospital here have been great and have arranged our flights to and accommodation in Hong Kong, although this required complex negotiations between BUPA International, BUPA (which is different, it seems), and his company. They have booked his surgery, and even emailed him a letter from the surgeon telling him what he needs to bring to the hospital and so on.

Which is where the trouble started.

The letter stated: ‘Please bring with you pyjamas, gown, slippers, toothbrush, toiletries and towel’. Now, Peter doesn’t wear pyjamas. Or slippers. His dressing-gown is at home in Harbin. Ditto all his towels (he knew he’d be staying in hotels where towels are provided, so didn’t bring one, and neither did I).

So, ok, we think. A T-shirt and shorts will pass for pyjamas. Flip-flops will serve as slippers. We could ‘borrow’ a towel from the Hong Kong hotel for a couple of days. Then Peter had a brainwave and decided that before we leave here he would buy one of the nice, white, waffle-weave bathrobes which the hotel provide in the room. The book of guest services expressly states ‘Should you wish to purchase a bathrobe, please contact the Housekeeping Office’. Knowing that Housekeeping’s English wasn’t brilliant, we asked a guy at reception how much the bathrobes cost. It took several attempts to get him to understand what we were talking about, but eventually he phoned Housekeeping, and told us they cost 350 RMB (just under £30), which seemed not unreasonable, but we wanted to consider our finances so we thanked him and returned to our room.

The other reason for hesitating was that we couldn’t remember whether the robes had the hotel logo emblazoned across them in a prominent fashion which would be a bit embarrassing in hospital. However, when we tried to check by looking at the robes in the room, we found that the maid had taken them when she cleaned, and not replaced them. There had been one there at the start of the week, Peter said, which he’d used and it hadn’t been replaced for several days. I used the new one this morning and once again it had disappeared, as sometimes happens.

Having decided to proceed anyway, Peter phoned Housekeeping.

P: Hello, it says in the book in my room that it is possible to purchase a bathrobe, so I would like to buy one please.
Housekeeping: Book?
P: Yes, the book that is in all the rooms.
[Silence].
P: It says on it…[describes front cover and title page of book in detail].
H: Yes?
P: Yes, well, if you turn to the page where it says ‘Housekeeping’, where it says, ‘Bathrobe’, it says ‘If you wish to purchase a bathrobe, please call Housekeeping’. I would like to purchase a bathrobe.
H: One moment please, sir. [Slight hiatus, then returns]. I will send someone to your room.
P: Thank you.
H: You’re welcome.

Five minutes later, a knock at the door. Someone from Housekeeping stands silently, then says, ‘May I help you?’ Peter takes her over to where the book is. ‘Ah, book!’ she says. He turns to the relevant page and painstakingly points to the Chinese writing under the ‘Bathrobe’ bit. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘One moment please’. And goes.

Another five minutes. Then a different wifie appears with three bathrobes, gives one to Peter, and starts looking around the room for our used ones. She looks in the cupboard, behind the bathroom door, on the bed, and casts a slightly accusing eye at our suitcases. Peter tries to explain that the bathrobes were removed when the room was cleaned and that we weren’t given new ones, but that what we want now is to buy a new one. She doesn’t understand, and phones Housekeeping. Peter patiently informs them, again, that the bathrobes were taken away and we have none. He suggests that perhaps now that she has brought three, she could leave them all – two for the room and one for us to buy. He hands the phone back to her for translation. She listens for a long time, then says, ‘One moment please’, and scuttles away, leaving one bathrobe behind.

Approximately fifteen minutes go by. Then the phone rings in the room and I answer it.

Housekeeping: Ah, good evening madam, I am so sorry to trouble you.
Me: That’s ok.
H: I just speak to room attendant, and she say that she put two bathrobe in your room this morning, so perhaps you forget or you put them somewhere different?
Me: No, we do not have any bathrobes. Well, we do, we have one, which your attendant just brought a few minutes ago, but before that we had no bathrobe. The attendant took the bathrobe away today and did not leave a new one. We have told you this several times but you don’t seem to believe us. I rather resent being accused of stealing bathrobes.
H: Oh, I am so sorry to trouble you.
Me: Well, ok, but all we want now is to buy a new one and charge it to our room bill.
[Pause]. H: Ah, you want…?
Me: To buy a bathrobe. And to add the cost to our room bill.
H: Sorry?
Me: The cost. Of the bathrobe.
H: Cost?
Me: Yes, the money. 350 Yuan. To add to our bill. Can we do that?
H: Cash or credit card?
Me: No, put on our room bill. The bill for our room. Our hotel bill. For our room.
[Pause]. H: One moment please. [Hangs up].

I’ve had enough. I phone reception and ask for the manager. He’s busy so I ask for him to phone me back.

Manager: Ah good evening madam, this is duty manager. How may I help you?
Me: Well, we’re having a bit of difficulty here this evening. [I relate the saga to date, explaining once again that we were given no new bathrobes, that we have not hidden or stolen them, and that we would like to buy one as offered in the guest services book].
DM: I am so sorry, madam, for your trouble. So you have no two bathrobe clean?
Me: [having to think a bit about this one]: When? Now?
DM: When you check in.
Me: Well, yes, there was one bathrobe when my husband checked in on Tuesday. He used it and it was taken away. Then later it was replaced with another one. I used it today and then it was taken away too, and we were given no new bathrobe. And nobody in Housekeeping seems to understand or believe us, and they keep phoning us asking where the bathrobes are.
DM: So you want new bathrobe clean? Or two?
Me [losing will to live]: No. We don’t care. [I try a new tack]. Is it possible to buy a bathrobe from the hotel? For 350 Yuan? And charge the amount to our room bill? Is that a service you offer?
DM: Ah, you want to buy new bathrobe? And to give signature and charge to your bill?
Me: YES!!!!!! Yes!! That’s what we want! Please! Thank you.
DM: Ah, sorry, we are confused. [You don’t say]. I call Housekeeping and send someone to your room.

Ten minutes later another girlie appears with two bathrobes. One is wrapped in plastic. She carefully explains that this is the one we can buy, and the other ‘you can use in my hotel’. She hands Peter a chit to sign, saying, ‘Credit card’. ‘No’, he says, ‘charge to room’. She goes to the phone. ‘Phone the Duty Manager’, I say. ‘He knows’. She phones and is quickly given the ok, so Peter signs and gets his bathrobe. This has taken more than half an hour.

The thing is, it’ll be so flippin’ hot in hospital in Hong Kong that I bet he never even wears it.
We quickly hung the remaining two in the wardrobe on full view to prevent any further accusations of robe theft. Thank God we’re leaving tomorrow.

Perversity

Since the arrival of our shiny new visas, we have spent the last few days acquiring more of the trappings of permanence here. Hence I now have a bank account, a Chinese mobile phone so that I can text Peter or phone other people in China without it costing both of us a bomb, a landline on which it’s now possible to make overseas calls, and a vacuum cleaner (which has no telephonic capacity as far as I know).

You’d think that in a country where a spectacular amount of hoop-jumping is required to obtain a visa, the opening of a bank account would be a tortuous process. Indeed, we had postponed this step until our residents’ permits were in place so as not to provoke any awkward questions regarding our projected length of stay in the country. However, what you do is: you walk into the bank. They photocopy your passport. You write your name on a tiny form in a tiny tiny box (most Chinese names are only two characters long, so they have some trouble with western names which come in three or four parts!), and sign the form. They enter your name and phone number into the computer. You sign again. They give you a cashpoint card and ask you to make up a PIN.

And, er, that’s it. Nobody asked about our jobs, income, ages, or how long we’d been at this or our previous 17 addresses. Nobody appeared to care whether we were laundering vast sums of money for a rogue nation or didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together. Nobody tried to sell us a mortgage, a pension or the services of an independent financial adviser. We didn’t have to complete a form the size of a small novel. There was no ‘Your cheque book will take 7 working days and your card another 14 working days after that, and then you might get your PIN and actually be able to use your account sometime in the next month’. We didn’t even have to pay any money in.

Buying the mobile phone – and even the vacuum cleaner – was more complicated and required the divulgence of more personal information than this.

Something is very wrong somewhere.

One other thing. The heating has finally come on. It will now stay on, 24/7, until about March I should think. Maybe April. And guess what? It’s TOO DARN HOT IN HERE NOW.

The cabbages are coming! (Part 2)

As a child, I loved the Moomin books by Finnish author Tove Jansson. If you’re not familiar with these, they tell of the adventures of a group of cute, fantastical creatures that live in the north of Scandinavia. Several of the books feature seasonal themes, such as one entitled Moomin Valley in November which describes how the various characters cope with seeing their world transformed from a summer playground to a bleak, autumnal landscape.

This is how it felt, returning to Harbin yesterday.

Firstly, the heating STILL isn’t on. We’re reliably informed, though, that it comes on next Monday. Apparently October 20th is the first day that it’s considered cold enough. Yeah, right. That’s why last night we sat in our flat wearing our coats and scarves, wondering how we would ever pluck up the courage to get undressed to go to bed. It’s a bit brutal after the heat of Shanghai (which was just pleasant at this time of year, should you ever consider a trip there; don’t go in August). It reminds me of the time we went on holiday to Tenerife at the end of September, and flew back into Glasgow airport at 3am on an October night which was, as the Scots say, baltic. It came, to put it mildly, as a bit of a shock to the system.

Note to self for next year: the first three weeks of October are not a good time to be in Harbin. They are a good time to take a long holiday, somewhere hot.

Secondly, the trees, which were all still green when we left less than two weeks ago, are now mostly yellow. I say mostly, because they are going yellow from the bottom up. I’ve never seen anything like it. If memory serves, the trees back home (and anywhere else I’ve ever observed trees in autumn) turn in a more random fashion, a few leaves yellowing here and there at first, some going quite brown and then dropping off, while a few green ones cling on tenaciously well into November.

Here, all the trees lining the road from the airport had brown, shrivelled leaves on the lower branches, completely yellow leaves over the middle and high branches, and right at the top, a tiny crown of green. They are spindly trees whose branches all point upwards. If anyone can enlighten me as to what kind they are, I’d be interested to find out - the knowledge of nature which I once gleaned from educational childhood drives with the AA Book of the Road being now sadly lost in the mists of time.

Last but not least, if the day we left was Leek Day, this is most definitely Cabbage Week. In some cases the leeks are still out as well, though most people seem to have put them away and they can be seen hanging from ceilings on balconies and in utility rooms. Outside our front door, however, we are privileged to have both. If you don’t believe me, here’s the photographic evidence. I’ll give a prize (virtual only, I’m afraid) to the first person who can correctly guess the next vegetable to appear on the streets on Harbin – if there is one.

Occasionally people come out and start trimming them or picking bits off them. I don’t know if this is just for preparation purposes or whether they’re harvesting bits for their dinner.

There are a number of other unanswered questions too, such as: do they leave them outside even when it starts snowing and is sub-zero? What happens when they start to rot? I can’t say I fancy living with the smell of rotting cabbage for the next 4 months.

But most importantly, how do they know whose leeks are whose? They’re everywhere. How can such a system possibly work? Do they have special Vegetable Wardens to prevent Grand Leek Larceny? Which if you ever watched The Good Life, you’ll know is a very serious matter. Certainly our security guard has taken to patrolling up and down this stretch of courtyard, and was very suspicious when I started taking pictures. The Leek Police dismisseth us.

We're legal !!

YES !!!!!!!!!

Seven and a half stressful weeks since Peter first arrived, and after a nightmare of confusion, changes of rules, jobsworth bureaucracy and an avoidable trip to the UK for Peter, we finally have our Residents' Permits. I just scraped in under the wire and would have had to fly home TODAY if anything had gone wrong. But thanks to the saintly but determined Candy we now have the magic pieces of paper stuck in our passports, which allow us to live and (in Peter's case, when combined with his work permit) work in, and travel in and out of, China. What a flippin' relief.

Until next year, when we have to do it all again.

Everyone sing along:

Wo-oh, I'm an alien
I'm a legal alien
I'm a Britisher in Harbin.

I'd like a glass of Harbin beer,
With a fa piao on the side,
And you can see it from my idiotic grin
I'm a Britisher in Harbin.

Sting, eat your heart out.

OK, I'm showing my age, I know.

More Shanghai sights

Why the panda is endangered...

[Ahem; assume husky phone-sex voice:] This is not just Shanghai. This is 21st century, fully capitalist, plastic Shanghai.

Shanghai sights

Photoshoot.

East meets west; old meets new. C'est la folie?










Dammit!




The Laughing Cow suddenly realises it's no joke.

The unbearable weirdness of being….an expat in China

Sorry, haven’t blogged so far this week: partly because I’m in Shanghai and my blog’s meant to be predominantly about Harbin – not that I feel I can’t talk about our travels to other parts of China, but there are others who write about Shanghai so I don’t want to tread on anyone’s toes. Funnily enough, no one else writes about Harbin (see below!).

The other reason is that I’ve been engrossed in an excellent book, The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday, which was a quick-grab purchase by Peter at the airport the other week (he’d read this guy’s first book). I am having to force myself to stop reading it and do other things because I like to savour books and not finish them too quickly. So here I am.

I was going to talk at some length about the fact that unlike Harbin, Shanghai has a proper expat community, which I’ve glimpsed a little this week for the first time really. In Harbin - unless there’s a secret westerners’ enclave upon which we have yet to stumble - the nearest thing we get to an expat community is occasionally seeing another non-Chinese person in the street, both of you grinning delightedly and then gazing longingly at the other’s retreating back, before you realise they’re most probably Russian and therefore unlikely to speak enough English to become your best friend.

We don’t really mind this too much at the moment, but in the interests of research I was going to do what my history teacher would probably have called ‘compare and contrast’ with a city which is used to, and actually caters for, foreigners. But then I decided that was very dull. So instead here’s a brief list of things I like about being a foreigner/expat in Shanghai, based on my limited experience thus far.

1. English language bookshops – fantastic. I don’t care if a paperback costs a tenner.
2. The Metro. I could happily ride around Shanghai all day on it without ever surfacing above ground. It’s bilingual. It’s brilliant. And I love it.
3. People not staring at you every time you step outside.
4. Seeing the occasional other foreigner and thus not feeling like a total freak (see 3).
5. Foreign supermarkets selling a random and not enormously wide selection of strange imported products (like Lidl gone horribly wrong). The goods for sale are mostly American but there’s some German, Dutch and French stuff; not much British and a very sorry lack of Marmite, but at least you can escape the smelly meat and live seafood sections which you get in Chinese supermarkets. Apparently M&S has just opened here too!
6. The likelihood that staff in shops may speak a little English, or will at least comprehend that if you don’t look Chinese, chances are you won’t understand them however much they follow you around trying to sell you stuff. (NB. Not foolproof, this one, however. Some of them follow you round trying to sell you stuff in English. Some just carry on in Chinese anyway. It’s a gamble.)

There are, of course, disadvantages – the most irritating probably being everyone’s desire to practise their English on you, which means that a simple stroll through any tourist area becomes a race to dodge groups of students shouting, ‘Helloooo!! Please, may we talk to you?!! Where are you from?!!! Please, come with us, we will show you Shanghai!!!!’ in a somewhat manic fashion.

It’s best to pretend to be French. When Peter’s really had enough he occasionally even answers them in Gaelic. That usually throws them.

So, anyway, what I decided to tell you instead of all that, was that on Wednesday we had a grand day out at the police station applying for – roll of drums and fanfare here please – our Residents’ Permits!! (I won’t tell you the whole story behind this until I know it’s gone through and my passport is safely back in my hands, but suffice to say it’s the culmination of weeks and weeks of ridiculous bureaucracy and hassle.)

The Alien Assimilation Centre or whatever they call it is a huge modern building in Pudong – the posh, new part of town, full of futuristic architecture and manicured flowerbeds. I’d assumed it wouldn’t be a speedy process, as most things in China involve waiting; even in Harbin the police/visa thing took an hour, and there were hardly any other foreigners there. But even we weren’t prepared for the epic scale of this particular round of doing nothing while other people shuffle paper pointlessly.

Our little helper Candy – who is as sweet as her adopted name suggests and who has been FANTASTIC and unerringly patient throughout this whole process – warned us that the minimum wait was usually an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. But when we reached the top of the escalator, passing a huge room full of Chinese people applying for visas to visit Hong Kong and Macao, into another huge hall which closely resembled the departure lounge of a large airport, with back-to-back seating all of which was occupied, we were issued with a little ticket like the ones you get in the booking office at the station or the deli counter in Sainsbury’s to tell you when your number’s up. Our number was 496. A screen showed that they were currently processing number 258.

Candy ran off to fill in forms for us, while we sat regretting not having brought our books, laptops, ipods, tea, coffee, sandwiches, intravenous vodka drips, stink bombs, hand grenades or anything else which might get us to the front of the queue faster or make the time pass more quickly. We did a bit of nationality-spotting, but as most people looked Chinese (but were probably Korean or Taiwanese) or American, it wasn’t that absorbing. A ginger-haired Italian and a woman who turned out to be from the Philippines and looked as though she had a shrunken head were about as interesting as it got.

We watched the time ticking by and tried in vain not to watch the numbers ticking by much more slowly. Dolefully we calculated that they were processing about one person per minute, which meant we had 200 minutes to wait. It was 2.30pm when we got there and the place closed at 5pm. Sleeping bags, camping stove, phone number of the British consul, cyanide capsules – why did no-one tell us to come prepared? If it had been an airport there would have been a Starbucks, vending machine, photobooth, newspaper stand, stall selling souvenir pens and T-shirts with ‘I’m a legal alien’ printed on them, branch of Cyanide-Capsules-R-Us, you name it. Marketing opportunities just passing them by.

One side of the room was lined with counters – not many of them actually staffed – and when your number came up we reckoned you had about 30 seconds to notice it on the screen, see which desk you were being called to, identify it and run up there, before they assumed you weren’t there and pressed a button for the next number. This was slightly nervewracking, and we were just devising a formation in which the three of us could stand spread out along the length of the room so as to cover all bases, when at 3.45, when they were on about number 320, a uniformed man with a megaphone strode into the room and starting shouting something.

Immediately there was a surge forward to the desks. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked Candy. She removed her ipod and listened thoughtfully for a moment. ‘All numbers before 380 can go up now and stand there’, she said. A young Israeli man who was sitting opposite us with his mum showed Candy his ticket excitedly. He was number 500. ‘No’, said Candy.

The ticket system now being given up as a bad job, small queues formed at each desk, intermittently shepherded and shouted at by the man with the megaphone, whose job it clearly was to harry people. He was the Harrier. His patch covered half the room and another, younger man who obviously hadn’t passed Grade 1 Shouting yet was patrolling the other half, looking menacing and regarding his colleague’s megaphone with envious eyes.

After the queues had gone down a bit, the Harrier decided they could handle the next wave and called numbers up to 450. Despite being the foreigner-processing area, all the announcements were in Chinese only. The Israeli boy tried again and was sent back again. We moved closer to the queues so as to be ready to leap when our turn came. A large Egyptian man tried to go forward too early and was sternly reprimanded by the Harrier. Then we spotted Candy making an audacious break into one of the queues, ahead of the Filipina and her pals. The Harrier hadn’t seen her. We held back in British anxiety until she reached the front and then joined her, but a surprisingly friendly policewoman told her to go back and wait.

Then at last – yes! – it was all numbers up to 500. Candy leapt forward. The Filipinas were too slow and ended up behind me, trying to work past me using only their hair. We were third in the queue. When we got to second, Candy turned to me and hissed, ‘Stand there. I’m going to see which line is faster’, and moved a few queues down. This caused consternation as she had now crossed into Junior Harrier’s patch. Senior Harrier finally spotted her and for a minute I thought we were for it. Fortunately, at that precise moment the person in front of us finished, and like lightning Candy was back with us and we reached the desk.

A certain amount of pushing, shoving and a bit more waiting later, they had looked through all our papers, taken our picture (I had to shove a woman’s arm out of the way when they did mine, otherwise it would have been right across my face on my photo), retained our passports for a week and sent us on our way.

This, then, my friends, is what it takes to be a foreigner in China. I can’t help feeling that if they told people about this in advance, they could probably ease their population problems quite significantly.

Of cabbages and things

Of all the sentences I ever thought I’d hear myself utter, ‘Oh God, I’m SOOO BORED of coming to Shanghai now!’ wasn’t one of them.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place – or at least what we’ve seen of it is (if you don’t mind air and noise pollution, excessive humidity and being almost mown down by scooters whenever you try to walk anywhere). It’s just that we seem to have spent a disproportionate amount of our time on a plane between here and Harbin, en route to or from an airport, or walking through the vast echoing halls of Pudong Terminal 2, which could be a fitness plan in its own right if you didn’t fancy any other forms of exercise. We’re up and down here so often that I’m becoming convinced that a) there are in fact no other places in China besides Harbin and Shanghai, and b) they’re just next door to one another, whereas in fact a) China’s ginormous and b) er, China’s ginormous and the distance between Shanghai & Harbin is about 1000 miles – a 2 and a half hour flight, or the equivalent of flying from Edinburgh to Prague or London to Rome and back every couple of weeks. No wonder it’s a drag.

Every time we come here we’re either in transit to somewhere else, always either jet-lagged or about to be and never have a chance to look around, or alternatively – as this time - we’re here to complete some tiresome visa-related errand involving being relieved of our passports for several days and generally messed about. And, having left Harbin complaining of the cold, here it’s still slightly disagreeably muggy and Peter, predictably, has done nothing but moan about the heat, while the aircon in the hotel is of course off since it’s now ‘winter’ (I even saw a girl in a woolly hat this morning).

As you’ll have gathered, I’m in a bad mood. I won’t be happy until we get these damn visas sorted out once and for all. But, in order to maintain peace and harmony and keep you entertained, I’m going to ignore it and tell you an interesting aside instead.

Last time he was down here, Peter was told that up until about twenty years ago - presumably before many people had fridges or freezers and before the advent of long-distance distribution and supermarket chains in China - it was common practice in Shanghai for everyone to have a stock of cabbages for the winter, which they kept outside on the ground or on their balconies so that they would remain cold. The cabbages were delivered about now, October, and kept throughout the winter, slowly rotting, but come February people would still be eating them, peeling off the outer rotten leaves to find they were still edible inside.

In modern Shanghai today you don’t see much of this, apparently. But the outdoor fridge tradition would appear to be alive and well in Harbin. Yesterday as we were driven to the airport we noticed that on every available space – on pavements, roadsides, front steps of apartment blocks and shops, hanging from balconies, windowsills and doorknobs, and being transported around on stalls, carts and bikes – were hundreds and hundreds of ….

LEEKS !!!

(Plus a few cabbages for good measure.)

They hadn’t been there a couple of days before. Where did they come from? Was yesterday one of those dates which everyone just knows by osmosis is Leek Day? I bet in two weeks’ time if you try to get leeks in the supermarket there won’t be a single one to be had.

Anyway, on a loosely related topic, for the Have I Got News for You fans among you, here’s the missing words round.

Frustrated Welsh farmers face prison over [....... ?]

Woman catches [......?] from garden badgers, report claims

Headlines from Farmers’ Weekly; don’t you just love trade journals?

Maybe we should tell the Welsh farmers about the Harbin leek glut? You never know; it might help.

The heat is on (not)

Harbin, as I think I may have mentioned, is a place with an extreme climate. Like Montreal, whose latitude it more or less shares. Now you know how an extreme climate works, don’t you? In winter it’s very very cold indeed, 30° below zero, with snow and ice and such. In summer it’s really very hot - 30° and more above - tropical, almost - so hot you’d never believe the ice & snow were there six months ago if you hadn’t seen them with your own eyes. Got it.

But wait, aren’t we forgetting something? Cast your mind back to primary school. How many seasons are there? That’s right. So what does an extreme climate do in the season that comes between summer and winter? Changes from one to the other, that’s what. And as the needle on that thermometer has to travel such a long way in such a short time, it changes pretty damn fast – dropping about 5 degrees per week in fact – at night anyway. If you’re not familiar with the climate of Edinburgh then you’ll no doubt wonder why I find this even worthy of comment. But if you were used to living in a place where the weather’s more or less the same all year round apart from the odd warmish week in July and the odd coldish week in January, you would understand why the concept of a proper autumn is a revelation.

Come April or May, when the process is reversed, I shall doubtless be reporting with smug delight the joys of actually being able to step outside in light clothing and bask in spring sunshine, rather than the Scottish custom of gazing with confusion at the advancing calendar and wondering why there are no leaves on the trees and I’m still wearing a woolly hat. But for now I’m grumpily stomping about the house swathed in fluffy socks and huge jumpers which don’t normally see the light of day until Christmas-time, and occasionally sporting my dressing-gown as outer wear, and cursing whoever’s brilliant idea it was to have the heating in all the buildings here centrally controlled.

Yes, you read that correctly. We can’t switch on our own heating. We have to wait until The Powers That Be deem it cold enough. Surely this is taking communist communal whatnot to its most ridiculous and barbaric extreme. (Although I seem to remember they have the same system in France. I rest my case.)

I had been holding out with some optimism for October 1st to be the big switch-on day. After all, September 1st was considered an appropriate date for switching off the air conditioning in all the buildings, so I reckoned, a month of in-betweeny weather and then bam – October – it’s winter and the heating goes on. The shopping malls have been overheated for a week or more so I really got my hopes up.

But, alas, yesterday came and went and our floorboards - under which, I’m told, our elusive heating lies - remain resolutely cold to the touch, despite me testing them with a hopeful toe every couple of hours. Peter’s boss (who’s in the same boat in his building) said, ‘Oh, in Anshan it doesn’t come on until 1st November’. But Anshan’s several hundred miles south of here. They couldn’t be that cruel up here, could they? Could they?

The trouble is that, actually, if I’m truly honest now, it’s still vaguely warm outside during the day. Balmy enough for a mini plaguette of ladybirds, even. (What are the chances of that? The last time I saw that was in the Long Hot Summer of 1976, and believe me, that ain’t where we’re headed right now!) The Harbin locals, being used to those 30°C summer temps & all, think it’s cold enough to wear jackets but it’s really not. The other day we went for a walk and wrapped ourselves up in jumpers, coats, scarves and gloves, so convinced were we that if it was this cold indoors it must be freezing out. When we got outside it was 19°C and we had to take everything off again.

Unfortunately our flat’s south-facing side is entirely blocked in by high buildings and so we get no sun whatsoever. Add to this our double (or in some places quadruple) glazing – of which we’ll no doubt be exceptionally glad when winter comes in earnest – and you have one highly insulated ice box with no heat source. Even Peter, He Who Never Feels Cold, is wearing a fleece and his SHOES indoors.

I’m so depressed I nearly did my tax return.

But instead, I have decided that as Peter has to go to Shanghai on Sunday in order to start the next stage of the visa saga on Monday, little though I relish the prospect of leaving our home to live in a hotel again, I shall decamp there with him for a week or so. It’s 25-30°C there at the moment. (Ironically, Chinese government policy is that all public buildings south of the Yangtze River have no heating at all, so in a month’s time everyone in Shanghai will be sitting in the office with their overcoats on while we in Harbin will be walking on hot floors. I hope).

Then next week I shall do my best to convince everyone that I shouldn’t risk trying to get my visa in Shanghai and that it would be best for me to go back to the UK to get it as Peter did, and stay there for a couple of weeks. I know it’ll be cold and miserable there, but you have a brilliant thing called an On switch, and right now that sounds like heaven.

Fun, part 2

I haven’t said much so far about eating in restaurants in China, although it’s something we’ve done a fair bit of, so here goes. Prepare to forget everything you thought you knew from your nights down at the Sunrise Take-Away.

If you go to a restaurant in a large group, you’ll likely be shown into a private room. The tables are big and round, with a giant lazy susan in the middle so that dishes can be spun round and shared. The concept of ordering one meal per person is unknown here, and there’s no such thing as starters and main courses. You just order a number of dishes, each one of which will be either meat, or veg, or rice, etc, kind of like tapas, and then share them, with each person taking a small portion from the main plate and transferring it to their own plate, or even eating it direct from the main plate. If you’re worried about catching other people’s germs from them dipping their chopsticks into your food, tough. I gather that eating out CAN get raucous (especially if there’s a lot of ‘Ganbei!’ which the dictionary translates as ‘Cheers!’ but is really a challenge to down a drink in one) but this usually only happens in all-male company. Typical.

The whole business can be somewhat disconcerting if you’re not used to it. As is the fact that the waiters expect to discuss your food requirements with you at length, suggesting dishes which will complement those you’ve already ordered so as to achieve a ‘ying-yang’ type balance, and they therefore bring you the menu and continue to stand by you while you look at it, pen at the ready, and get very confused if you ask them to go away. The menu is usually all in Chinese but has photos – do not be fooled by these, however, as the food when it comes generally bears no resemblance to them, and anyway you could be eating duck’s head or bull’s penis for all you know, so it’s best to have an interpreter on standby! They just bring out the food in the order it’s ready, so the thing which takes longest to cook could well arrive after you’ve finished everything else. So quite how this achieves a balance is slightly beyond me.

Mostly the food is actually very tasty. Northern Chinese cuisine is quite different from the Cantonese food we’re used to in Britain – spicier, less sweet, more noodle and dumpling-based than rice, but beyond that I find it hard to summarise except to say that if you’re after Sweet & Sour Pork, Prawn Crackers or Chicken Chow Mein with Special Fried Rice you won’t find any such thing. My rule of thumb is I don’t eat it if it looks slimy. Peter is prepared to try anything except chicken’s feet. And beyond that, it’s all a voyage of discovery!

The strangest meal we’ve had was in a restaurant called ‘Triplepot’ which we went into because it had an English name. Sadly it turned out they spoke no English whatsoever and had to find a student who was eating upstairs to come and translate for us. He could not, however, prepare us for the eating experience. The table had a circular hole in it, in the base of which was a hotplate. They brought over a large pan divided into three sections, one containing water, one ordinary oil and one chilli oil, and lit the thing until all three boiled. They then brought out the food – raw – and we had to cook it ourselves by dipping it into the compartments, instructed by actions from the bemused staff.

Our favourite so far, though, is the highly entertaining ‘western style’ restaurant near our flat. They have a bizarre menu with dishes apparently plucked at random from the various cuisines of Europe, called things like ‘German-style fried potatoes’ and ‘French-style chicken with mushroom juice’. (‘This is chicken with a mushroom juice’, the menu explains in the small print, in case you weren’t clear). The food’s very nice, but everything is served in the Chinese way as described above, with the sharing and the random serving order. If you ask for water, they may bring you hot water – for what purpose I’m not sure. Oh, and you get free bread, butter and jam for pudding. The atmosphere is also curious; it’s never very busy but like everywhere in China they have hundreds of staff. The first time we went there we were the first customers of the night, and ate our dinner observed by twelve waiters and a girl pianist in thigh-high denim boots, who tinkles away at lift-music standards like ‘Love Story’ in a somewhat minimalist style while you eat and attempt to ignore the stares. It gives a whole new meaning to ‘going out for an English’!

But they try their best, bless them. They even have a feedback questionnaire which as an ex market researcher I think is so brilliant I shall quote it for you in full.

The Investigation Answer Sheet of Victoria Western Restaurant

Thank you for spending your time in filling in this answer sheet. We will according to it ameliorate our service and make you a much more happiness at Victoria.

1. Excuse me, do you usually come to a western restaurant?
· Occasionally
· Usually
· Once a month or above
2. Please tell us whether you are satisfied with the atmosphere of this western restaurant.
3. Excuse me, are you satisfied with the food of the restaurant?
4. Excuse me, are you satisfied with the price of the food?
5. Excuse me, are you satisfied with the service quality of the workers?
6. Excuse me, are you satisfied with the circumstances of the sanitation?
7. How do you know the Victoria Western Restaurant?
· The friend’s introduction
· Saw it by chance while driving
· Advertisement
· Others
8. The advice that you’d like to tell us is…..

Thank you again for the support to Victoria Western Restaurant. Wisher to have a meal pleased! Happy your life!

This feedback sheet was being done by YUMMY&LIFE magazine jointly.

I would love to fill it in, but words do occasionally fail me.

Fun

Last night we had our first social engagement since we came to China a month ago (if you don’t count a token-gesture meal out with the Big Boss in Shanghai the week we arrived, which you shouldn’t).

This was a ‘party’ given by the Less Big Boss here in Harbin, ostensibly as a belated flat-warming but really a Meet the Girlfriend event, as she’s visiting for the week. This is, annoyingly for those of us stalled in the middle of visa processing, a holiday week here. Today, 1st October, is China’s National Day – the anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 1949 – and they get a whole week off for it. All of them. Well, shops are open, builders are still building (drilling above my head as I type), but nobody else is doing a stitch of work all week.

Up until last year they had three of these ‘Golden Weeks’ as they’re called: this one, one in February for Chinese New Year, and one in May for Labour Day. The purpose of these is to boost the economy through increased domestic tourism and binge shopping and NOT, as you might imagine, to give the poor overworked Chinese a few days’ paid holiday, which they actually don’t get otherwise unless they’re lucky enough to work for a western company. But as of this year the government decided people weren’t spending enough and the detrimental impact on the economy from everything shutting down was outweighing the advantages, so they cut one of the Golden Weeks (the May one) and replaced it with a few extra one-day holidays instead. Now everyone is up in arms about it because a three-day weekend isn’t much use for visiting long-distance family in a country the size of China, and as a result this week was predicted to be the busiest October week for travel ever.

Apart from that, I don’t think much goes on really. There are quite a few red lanterns up around the place (see pic), which is pretty. I was hoping to see some kind of spectacular parade, but it seems that unless it’s a special anniversary that kind of thing went out with Mao. There might be a firework display but I’m not hopeful.

So, to return to the subject of Fun, Chinese style. Now those of you who know me know I like a party. Drinking, dancing, chatting, loud music, more dancing, more drinking, etc. That’s a party, right? Wrong, it seems, in China. Perhaps it was just that particular group of people, who were all Chinese apart from us, Boss and Boss’s girlfriend, or perhaps we’re getting old (heaven forbid!), but this so-called party consisted of nine people sitting around a coffee table picking at nibbles – rather self-consciously as the Chinese weren’t touching them – talking mainly about the weather and the best methods of cleaning hard-wood floors (I kid you not), and then having to go out for a meal because Boss didn’t have enough plates to serve us all food. We got to the restaurant about 9pm, which is considered extremely late for eating here, and everyone picked at their food again and at 10.30 all went home.

Just wait until we have our flat-warming party; we’ll show them how it should be done.